1. Field of Disclosure
The invention concerns a corrugating machine and a method of producing corrugated cardboard.
2. Background Art
For producing continuous webs of material, conventional corrugating machines have several splicing devices, each of which joining a plurality of discontinuous webs of material to form a continuous web of material. In technical language, joining the discontinuous webs of material to form a continuous web of material is referred to as splicing, the devices required therefor thus being referred to as splicing devices. The splicing procedure causes joining points—so-called splices—to form between the discontinuous webs of material of the continuous webs of material. The joining points of the continuous webs of material are visible in the corrugated cardboard upon production thereof and must be cut out for quality reasons by means of a cross-cutting device. In order to precisely cut out the joining points, the cross-cutting device must be able to locate the positions of the joining points in the webs of corrugated cardboard which is quite problematic as storage devices are disposed in the corrugating machine for temporarily storing the web of corrugated cardboard during the production process; consequently, the length of the temporarily stored web of corrugated cardboard is not precisely known.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,676,790 teaches to spray a liquid, such as water, onto the web of corrugated cardboard by means of a spraying device before temporarily storing the corrugated cardboard, thereby causing a spot to form on the web of corrugated cardboard. This spot is detected by means of a thermal detector after temporary storage of the web of corrugated cardboard such that the length of the temporarily stored web of corrugated cardboard may be determined in dependence of the runtime of the spot and other known system parameters. A drawback thereof is, however, that spraying on the liquid requires provision of complex machinery and elaborate procedures.